The present invention relates to room air conditioners and more particularly, to room air conditioners having an exhaust vent.
Room air conditioners typically are positioned in a window or in a through the wall sleeve such that a front part of the air conditioner unit is positioned in a space to be cooled, such as a room, and a back part is exposed to the exterior of the space, typically the outdoors. The interior of the room air conditioner includes a compressor for compressing gaseous refrigerant, a condenser to condense the gaseous refrigerant to a liquid, and to release heat in the process, and an evaporator to allow the refrigerant to evaporate, and to absorb heat in the process. The condenser is positioned in the back part and the evaporator is positioned in the front part. A blower is utilized to draw room air in through an inlet grill, to pass over the evaporator so that heat from the air is given up to the evaporator, and hence cooled, and the air then passes through the blower to pressurize the air, causing it to flow out of the air conditioner through an outlet grill back into the room. Generally, the room air is continuously recirculated from the room and back into the room. Occasionally it is desirable to vent room air to the outdoors through the air conditioner, and in this situation it is known to provide an openable door from the area of the pressurized air to the back part of the air conditioner where it will be permitted to flow out of the air conditioner unit. Oftentimes the provision of such vent doors requires complicated structures comprising many different parts requiring costly assembly of the various parts.
It would be an improvement in the art if a vent door were provided which did not entail the complicated structure required by the prior art.
The present invention provides for a vent door formed of a single part arranged in a room air conditioner which can be arranged and held in place without the use of any additional parts such as fasteners, and which permits a user to easily and quickly move the door from a closed position to a closed position and vice versa, and which gives the user a visual indication of the position of the door.
In an embodiment, the vent door is a slide member positioned between an opening in an evaporator air blower shroud, which communicates with an area of high air pressure resulting from the blower and an opening in a wall separating the front side of the room air conditioner from the back side. The slide member has an elongated arm which extends forwardly of a front of the air conditioner where it can be easily grasped by a user of the air conditioner and moved between an open and a closed position. For example, the open position may be where the arm of the slide member is pulled forward from the front of the air conditioner, so that when the door is in the open position, the arm will be protruding a greater extent from the front of the air conditioner than when the door is closed. In this manner, the user is given a visual indication of the position of the door.
To move the door to the closed position, the arm is pushed back into the air conditioner until the movement is stopped by interference between the slide member and the interior components of the air conditioner. Even in this position the arm will protrude slightly from the front of the air conditioner so that the user can grasp the arm to move it to the open position.
The interior components of the air conditioner, such as the blower shroud and the wall separating the front and back portions of the air conditioner can be formed to slidingly receive and guide the slider member so that additional parts and fasteners are not required to maintain the slider member in the correct position.